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HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD
April 17, 1915âJune 16, 2003
BY GEORGE CARDONA
H ENRY M. HOENIGSWALD, professor emeritus of linguistics
at the University of Pennsylvania, died on June 16,
2003, in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Henry began his career
as a classicist. He contributed articles on Etruscan and Latin
and important studies in Greek phonology, morphology,
and metrics, the last of which he completed just before his
death. He was, in addition, a well-versed Indo-Europeanist
and contributed to Indo-Iranian linguistics; further, during
the Second World War, he was engaged in modern Indo-
Aryan and produced a handbook of Hindustani. Henryâs
greatest contributions to linguistics, however, are of a more
general theoretical nature. He was a major figure in seek-
ing to understand and clarify the principles that underlie
great work in historical-comparative linguistics, especially
as practiced by the nineteenth-century neogrammarians and
their successors. Henry contributed fundamental studies in
these areas, including an early article on sound change and
its relation to linguistic structure, a basic study of the pro-
cedures followed in phonological reconstruction, an equally
fundamental study of internal reconstruction, and a defini-
tive monograph on language change and linguistic recon-
struction.
181

182 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
Henryânamed Heinrich Max Franz HÃ¶nigswald at
birthâwas born on April 17, 1915, in Breslau, Germany
(now Wroclaw, Poland), into an academic family, the son
/
of Richard HÃ¶nigswald, an eminent professor of philoso-
phy at the University of Breslau. Henry received a tradi-
tional education at the Johannes-Gymnasium in Breslau and,
after his father moved to the University of Munich, at the
Humanistische Gymnasium in Munich, which he entered in
May 1930 and from which he graduated with honor and
distinction in the spring of 1932. He went on to study at
the University of Munich, where from 1932 to 1933 he pur-
sued studies in the Department of Humanities, working with
such scholars as Eva Fiesel, an authority on Etruscan, and
the renowned Indo-Europeanist Ferdinand Sommer. The
latter was also a friend of the HÃ¶nigswald family.
Henry became interested in the classics, Indo-European,
and linguistics at an early age. Years later he reminisced
(1980, p. 23) about how his interest in these areas was first
aroused:
My story is very different. I suppose I was a fairly typical product of German
secondary education. We had a Greek teacher who must have had a course
in Indo-European and who taught us some of the things he knew. I bought
Kieckerâs Historical Greek Grammar (âSammlung GÃ¶schenâ1) and one birthday
I got Brugmannâs Kurze vergleichende Grammatik. Since then I knew I
wanted to be a classicist or, even better, a linguist.
As was true for many scholars of that time, Henryâs
family was subjected to the dictates of German Nazism. His
father was nominally a convert to Christianity (his mother
died when Henry was only six)âand Henry was confirmed
in the evangelical church, but these were formalities to en-
sure tenure at a university and a place in civil society for an
intellectual family that was ancestrally Jewishâthough they
rejected all religion and superstitionâin a place in Ger-

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 183
many (Silesia) that was quite intolerant of Jews. For this
ancestry they paid a price. In 1930 Richard HÃ¶nigswald
shifted from Breslau to the University of Munich, but by
1933, Jews were forbidden to attend German universities,
so that Henry then began a period of scholarly wandering.
He went first to Switzerland, where from 1933 to 1934 he
studied in Zurich with the classicist and Indo-Europeanist
Manu Leumann and was a fellow student of the Hellenist
Ernst Risch, with whom he maintained a lifelong friend-
ship. In the fall of 1934 Henry moved to Italy, where he
continued his studies at the University of Padua and in the
summer of 1935 passed an intermediate examination, again
with honor and distinction. He proceeded to work on a
doctoral thesis on Greek word formation while completing
a preparatory paper on the relationship between Sanskrit
and Avestan. When his mentor, Giacomo Devoto, moved
from Padua to Florence, Henry followed and received his
doctorate (D.Litt. summa cum laude) in 1936 from the
University of Florence, with a dissertation on the history
of Greek word formation (Geschichte der griechischen
Wortbildung), a work that to my knowledge has never been
published. He went on to receive the perfezionamento, a
research degree, from the same university in 1937. From
1936 to 1938 he held his first academic appointment, as a
staff member in the Istituto di Studi Etruschi, Florence.
Politics then intervened once more. Foreigners who
had come to Italy after 1918 were obliged to leave the country,
so that Henry could not remain in Florence for the winter
semester of 1938-1939; he moved back to his family in Munich.
On March 26, 1939, Henry left Bavaria for Switzerland in
the company of his father, stepmother, and sister, taking
refuge in Braunwald in Glarus in preparation for going to
the United States. However, Henry was not included in the
family permit for departure and had to remain behind. On

184 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
September 22 he finally obtained passage on a ship from
Genoa and arrived in New York in October 1939. These
early experiences left deep impressions, and in later years
both Henry and his wife were devoted to the cause of hu-
man and civil rights and were active members of local and
national organizations supporting these rights.
In the United States Henry at first continued a life of
scholarly peregrination. Between 1939 and 1948 he held
positions as research assistant, lecturer, and instructor at
Yale Universityâwhere he was research assistant to Edgar
Sturtevantâthe Hartford Seminary, Hunter College, and
the University of Pennsylvania, then associate professor at
the University of Texas at Austin (1947-1948), in addition
to a one-year stint (1946-1947) in the Foreign Service Insti-
tute of the U.S. Department of State. During this time, in
1944, Henry married Gabriele (âGabiâ) SchÃ¶pflich, herself
an accomplished classicist, whom he had met years earlier
while they were both students in Munich. Gabi died in 2001.
In 1948 Henry joined the University of Pennsylvania,
succeeding Roland Grubb Kent. Promoted to the rank of
full professor in 1959, he made Penn his academic home
for the remainder of his career, though he was invited to
and visited several other universities in the United States
(University of Michigan, Georgetownâwhere he held the
Collitz Professorship in the Linguistic Institute in 1955â
Princeton, Yale), in Europe (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven;
St. Johnâs College, Oxford; University of Kiel); and in India
(Deccan College, Poona [now Pune]). During his long and
distinguished tenure at Penn, Henry was the major force in
strengthening the linguistics department, founded by Zellig
S. Harris, which he served as chair from 1963 to 1970 and
cochair from 1978 to 1979; he remained a Nestor for the
department long after.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 185
In America Henry interacted with many major scholars
who had a strong influence on his thinking and work. He
also encountered âinnumerable new things to learnâ (1980,
p. 25), such as articulatory phonetics, phonemics, and the
anthropological approach to linguistics. Of paramount im-
portance for a young scholar coming from his background,
there was the feeling of freedom and exposure to new vistas
accompanying this. Henry put it well when he said:
In 1939âhalf a year after Sapirâs deathâI found myself at Yale as Sturtevantâs
research assistant. Quite aside from the inextricable connection (for me)
with my escape to personal freedom, I wish I could convey the headiness of
the experienceâno amount of picture painting of my Old-World inter-war
background as I have attempted it can describe it.
Henry received his share of deserved honors. He was
elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1971, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and the
National Academy of Sciences in 1988. He was elected a
corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 1986, and
was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behav-
ioral Sciences (1962-1963) as well as a Guggenheim fellow
in 1950. He was also elected president of the Linguistic
Society of America in 1958 and the American Oriental Soci-
ety in 1966. In addition, Henry received the Henry Allen
Moe Prize of the American Philosophical Society in 1991.
He also received honorary degrees from the University of
Pennsylvania (L.H.D. in 1988) and Swarthmore College
(L.H.D. in 1981). Upon his retirement in 1985 Henry was
honored by colleagues and friends with a felicitation vol-
ume, published two years later (Cardona and Zide, 1987)
and in 1986 the American Oriental Society dedicated a num-
ber of its journal to Henry.
Several threads are discernible in Henryâs work, and
he felt the need to express himself (1980, p. 27) on how he
would âlike to think that the various different tasks which I

186 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
have tackled over the years and which keep me busy now,
somehow hang together, however much each one of them
may have depended on inevitable accident.â To begin with,
there is the philology; various papers dealing with topics in
Etruscan, Greek, and Latin, as well as a smaller number of
articles treating issues in Indo-Iranian and Sanskrit. To a
very large extent, however, what motivates these studies is
an underlying quest for generalization: methods and prin-
ciples governing how languages change over time and how
one goes about reconstructing an ancestral protolanguage.
The need to find these principles and to make explicit the
methods followed in historical and comparative linguistics
occupied him throughout his career. Henry mentioned (1980,
p. 24) his early preoccupation with such issues, including
his wish that comparative evidence be presented âupward
in time as inference, and not downward as history.â2 The
close attention to principles and methods also led Henry to
be involved closely with the history of the field to which he
contributed. He was particularly careful to distinguish be-
tween the concrete work that such giants of nineteenth-
century Indo-European linguistics as Karl Brugmann and
Jacob Wackernagel carried out and the theoretical âpreach-
ments,â as he occasionally called them,3 of August Leskien,
Brugmann, and others. This attention to methods and the
history of his field complemented Henryâs interest, in his
later years, in the related area of cladistics (Hoenigswald
and Wiener, 1987).
In view of Henryâs constant preoccupation throughout
his professional life with methodology and procedures for
reconstructionâhe went so far as to speak on occasion of
algorighms4âLanguage Change and Linguistic Reconstruc-
tion may justifiably be considered his major work. This mono-
graph is certainly the principal recapitulation of thinking
that went back to his very early years, results of which Henry

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 187
published in a series of articles (1944, 1946, 1950), the
earliest of which appeared when he was not yet 30 years
old. In accordance with the only procedure he thought
properânamely, presenting historical materials âupward in
time as inference, and not downward as historyâ for pur-
poses of reconstructionâHenry did not follow here the cus-
tom observed in the usual textbooks on the subject. It is
noteworthy, for example, that he did not begin with any
discussion about the regularity of sound change5 or use
Proto-Indo-European constructs and Grimmâs and Vernerâs
laws as illustration; moreover, the great majority of examples
used to illustrate procedures and principles are from such
well-attested languages as English, Latin, and Romance lan-
guages.6 He also diverged from the usual practice by deal-
ing first with morphological change and only later with sound
change. It is only after treating grammar and semantics,
ending with a chapter (7, pp. 68-71) on the reconstruction
of grammatical and semantic features, that he proceeds to
treat sound change and the comparative method with re-
spect to phonology and its reconstruction.
In all this, Henry was rigorously formal and, it is im-
portant to emphasize, treated changes in terms of distribu-
tion, saying, for example (1960, p. 15), âNote that these
four classes are defined entirely by their distribution of the
segments A and Bâand they may or may not have other
distinguishing characteristics.â While dealing with the dis-
tribution of elements, both phonological and morphologi-
cal, he made use also of what he called ânilâ and symbol-
ized Ã.7 Further, nil could be a primitive, not merely an
absence due to loss. Thus, for example, while illustrating
unconditioned sound loss with the example of early Latin
hortus (garden), which in later Latin has no h-, Henry op-
erates not only with the change h > Ã but also with a change
Ã > Ã, as in ortus (risen), which lacked any initial conso-

188 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
nant in both early and late Latin. He notes in this context,
âin fact, any conveniently assumed number of Ãâs may be
posited as occurring between any two segmental phonemes
found in sequence. Thus, the environment of Ã in English
includes tâi,# ât, but not #â .â This emphasis on distri-
bution went beyond phonology and morphology to include
semantic change. Accordingly, Henry notes (1960, p. 45),
The phrase âsemantic changeâ or âchange of meaningâ is properly applied
to morphs; if a morph at a later stage appears otherwise than as a part of a
corresponding morphemeâif, in other words, it has changed its morphe-
mic environmentâit is quite rightly said to have changed its meaning.
Thus avunculus, ce ace-cheek, flesh, meat, taken as morphs (i.e., identified
Â¯
phonemically) have all undergone semantic change.
Earlier in the same work (1960, p. 29) the approach in
question is made more explicit in a section entitled âOne-
to-One Replacement by Existing Morphs (Semantic Change),â
in which are charted possible environments (I, II, III, IV)
for old English wonge (cheek) and ce ace (jaw) and their
Â¯
modern English counterparts, respectively cheek and jaw.
This formal approach could appear deceptively simple, as
when Henry dealt with what he called the principal step in
comparative grammar in a remarkably short compass (1950).8
Henryâs consistent probing into the methods and prin-
ciples underlying concrete work in historical linguistics was
also colored by a healthy skepticism. It is typical, for ex-
ample, that the title of his contribution to a volume on
universals (Hoenigswald, 1966) is a question, that he does
not simply assume there are given universals merely to be
exemplified. It is also typical of Henryâs nature that he ends
this essay with a view to the future, noting that transforma-
tional grammar âmay also bring new principles of impor-
tance to an understanding of the universals of change.â

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 189
Henryâs healthy skepticism combined well with his back-
ground as a philologist and his search for principles and
methods to produce insightful work on the history of lin-
guistics. A citation from his paper on the history of the
comparative method (Hoenigswald, 1966, p. 1) will serve to
illustrate:
Existing self-description, being itself a phenomenon in the history of schol-
arship, must not necessarily be taken at face value. On the other hand, the
business of gleaning procedures, principles, and presuppositions from an
analysis of the record is a slow process which has been engaged in for some
areas but not for others. Yet it alone can yield the substance in which we
are interested.
Among the âfew strandsâ he had to offer in what he
called âthis rich tissue,â one brings neatly to the fore Henryâs
attitude and insight: the interpretation of the famous state-
ment made in 1786 by Sir William Jones, with which he
dealt on more than one occasion (e.g., 1963, pp. 2-3; 1974,
p. 349). Jonesâs words, which Henry cited almost in full
(Hoenigswald, 1963, p. 2), are:
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful struc-
ture; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more
exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger
affinity, both in roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could
have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer
could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from
some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar
reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick
and the Celtick , though blended with a very different idiom, had the same
origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian may be added to the same
family, if this were the place for discussing the antiquities of Persia.
Henryâs careful reading of Jonesâs proclamation, taking
it in the context of its time, rules out any possibility that
Jones had in mind a protolanguage as reconstructed through
modern methods or a procedure for recovering such a source.

190 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
Contrasting the procedure followed in comparative linguis-
tics with what Jones said and alluding to the possibility of
wrongly reading such a procedure into this statement, Henry
remarks (1963, p. 3), âWe are asked to imagine that Jones
had in some intuitive fashion subjected Greek, Latin, and
Sanskrit to a similar process, and had been forced to con-
clude (as indeed we would now be forced to conclude) that
the ancestor was unlike each of the three. But this cannot
be right.â He then goes on to demonstrate how this read-
ing of Jonesâs statement could not be correct.
Henry was keenly aware of the intellectual legacies to
which he was heir. Forty years after leaving Europe, he would
say in recollection (Hoenigswald, 1980, p. 24):
About the substantive work I learned from such masters as Sommer, Fiesel,
Leumann, and Devoto and from fellow students like Ernst Risch. From
Leumann, in particular, I learned more, namely that there are formalisms
in historical linguistics which have little to do with sound laws, and that
you can discuss them observing and analyzing the masterpieces of the Brugmanns
and the Wackernagels, and, in general, the riches of the scholarly record.
Leumannâs paper on the mechanics (note the word!) of semantic change9
seems to me to be one of the greatest methodological gems, for all its
hardnosed factualness. My own first publications were case histories having
to do with the âmechanicsâ of the word-formation.
It is evident that in Manu Leumann, who also was a
Homeric scholar and a Latinist, Henry met not only a men-
tor at a time of need but also a kindred spirit. For Henryâs
work and reminiscences of his early school days show a
brilliant intellect given to detailed investigations of prob-
lems whose solutions are amenable to formalism. It is just
as evident that Henry later met with an equally sympathetic
and brilliant spirit, Zellig S. Harris, with whom he had a
long and close relation, personal as well as intellectual. The
emphasis on distribution that permeates Henryâs work is to
be seen also in the theoretical linguistic work Harris car-

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 191
ried out in the last century from the 1940s to the early
1990s.10 Henry and Harris met regularly during the sixties,
seventies, and eighties to discuss problems of common in-
terest. It must not be forgotten that Harris began his career
as a Semitist, so that Henryâs investigations into historical
and comparative linguistics could meet with a sympathetic
and comprehending mind in these discussions.
Henryâs association with Zellig Harris was but one in
an extensive network of friends and colleagues. At the time
he came to Penn, the linguistics department was in its in-
fancy, with Harris and Leigh Lisker, a phonetician, as col-
Â·
leagues, later to be joined by the logician Henry Hiz. When
I joined the department in 1965âafter five years in the
Department of South Asian Regional Studiesâit was a very
small close-knit group of scholars who not only regularly
met to exchange ideas but frequently also attended one
anotherâs seminars. Henry was central to this group. He
also showed extraordinary warmth and lack of pretense. I
have personal memories of joint seminars we gave in which
we both could freely exchange opposing views in search of
better solutions to problems of common interest, though I
was more than 20 years his junior. During those years, al-
though our linguistics department was itself quite small,
the University of Pennsylvania could boast of an outstand-
ingly broad and distinguished array of programs in various
allied areas, including the classics, Indic, Iranian, Baltic,
Slavic, Germanic, Semitics, and Sumerology. Moreover,
through the organization of teaching units known as gradu-
ate groups, members of the linguistics department regu-
larly taught in other departments, so that there was an ex-
hilarating interaction of colleagues and students, who could
take courses across departmental borders. In this atmosphere,
Henry thrived and, with a superb talent for social as well as
intellectual intercourse, he maintained and promoted the

192 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
study of linguistics, strengthening the department with his
service as chairman over many years. These activities ex-
tended well beyond the confines of Penn, and over genera-
tions Henry was a prime defender and promoter of the
fields he cultivated, in universities both here and abroad as
well as in learned societies.
Henry was also extremely generous toward young scholars
worthy of support, a generosity that was rewarded with feel-
ings of intellectual admiration and personal warmth toward
him on the part of an array of many scholars who went on
to excel. In this spirit it is fitting, I think, that I end this
essay citing the whole of a Sanskrit couplet whose last part
was used to end the foreword to Henryâs Festschrift:
Â·
vidvadvattvaÃ± ca nrpatvaÃ± ca naiva tulyam kada cana |
Â¯
Â· 11
Â´
svades e pujyate raja vidvan sarvatra pujyate ||
Â¯ Â¯Â¯ Â¯ Â¯
I AM GRATEFUL TOHenryâs sister Trudy Glucksberg, his
daughters Ann and Frances Hoenigswald, as well as Roswitha
Grassl and Prof. Anna Morpurgo Davies for details of Henryâs
early life.
A fairly complete bibliography of Henryâs work through 1985 ap-
peared in his Festschrift (pp. xiii-xix); a more up-to-date bibliogra-
phy covering publications up to 1999 compiled by C. Justus with
Henryâs cooperation is available at http://www.utexas.edu.cola/depts/
lrc/iedocctr/ie-pubs/hmh.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 193
CHRONOLOGY
1918 Born April 17 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocl aw,/
Poland)
1932-1933 Studied in the Department of Humanities, University
of Munich
1933-1934 Studied at the University of Zurich, Switzerland
1934-1935 Studied at the University of Padua, Italy
1935-1936 Studied at the University of Florence, Italy
1939 Emigrated to the United States
1944 Married to Gabrielle L. SchÃ¶pflich
1945 Naturalized citizen of the United States
1954-1958 Editor, Journal of the American Oriental Society
1968-2003 Advisory board, Language and Style
1968-1992 Member, editorial board, International Encyclopedia
of Linguistics
1968-1974 Member, corporate visiting committee for the Depart
ment of Foreign Literatures and Languages,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1977-2003 Associate editor, Indian Journal of Linguistics
1978-2003 Consulting editor, Journal of the History of Ideas,
Journal of Indo-European Studies
1978-1984 Chairman, overseers committee to visit the Depart
ment of Linguistics, Harvard University
1984-2003 Advisory board, Diachronica
1985 Retirement dinner, University of Pennsylvania, at
which he was presented with a prepublication copy
of Festschrift for Henry M. Hoenigswald
1985-2003 Consultant, Biographical Dictionary of Western
Linguistics
1986 Member, comparative linguistics delegation, IREX
1987 Member, organizing committee, Colloque Meillet
2003 Died, Haverford, Pennsylvania

194 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
AWARDS AND HONORS
1942-1943 Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies
1950 Guggenheim fellow
1956 Newberry Library fellow
1958 President, Linguistic Society of America
1962-1963 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, Palo Alto, California (with fellowship from
the National Science Foundation)
1966-1967 President, American Oriental Society
1971 Elected to the American Philosophical Society
1974 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1981 Awarded L.H.D. honoris causa, Swarthmore College
1986 Elected corresponding fellow, British Academy
1988 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences; awarded
L.H.D. honoris causa, University of Pennsylvania
1991 Awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize by the American
Philosophical Society
PROFESSIONAL RECORD
1936 D.Litt., University of Florence
1937 Perfezionamento, University of Florence
1936-1938 Staff member, Istituto di Studi Estruschi, Florence
1939-1942 Lecturer, research assistant, Yale University
1942-1943 Lecturer, Hartford Seminary Foundation; Hunter
College
1943-1944 Lecturer in charge, Army specialized training,
University of Pennsylvania
1944-1945 Lecturer, Yale University
1945-1946 Instructor, Hartford Seminary Foundation
1946 Lecturer, Hunter College; visiting associate professor,
University of Michigan (Summer Institute of
Linguistics)
1946-1947 P-4, Foreign Service Institute, Department of State
1947-1948 Associate professor, University of Texas at Austin
1948-1959 Associate professor, University of Pennsylvania
1952 Visiting associate professor, University of Michigan
(Summer Institute of Linguistics)

196 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
MEMBERSHIPS
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Oriental Society
American Philological Association
American Philosophical Society
Archaeological Institute of America
Friends and Alumni of Indo-European Studies, UCLA
Henry Sweet Society
Indogermanische Gesellschaft
International Society for Historical Linguistics
International Society of Friends of Wrocl aw University
/
Linguistic Society of America
Linguistic Society of India
Linguistics Association of Great Britain
National Academy of Sciences
New York Academy of Sciences
North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences
SocietÃ di Linguistica Italiana
Societas Linguistica Europaea
Studienkreis Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft
NOTES
1. Henry is referring to E. Kieckers, Historische griechische
Grammatik, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1925-1926.
2. In a typically self-deprecating manner, he went on immedi-
ately to add, âNot exactly original thoughts.â
3. For example, âHere we are once more up against the gap
between substantive practice and theoretical preachmentâ (Hoenigswald,
1978, p. 28) and earlier in the same paper (p. 21), âThere were
those who had no stomach for general talk and who preferred prac-
ticing to preaching.â
4. For example, âIn any event Rask is no closer than Jones to the
idea of an algorithm for reconstructionâ (Hoenigswald, 1974, p.
351).
5. In fact, Henry considered the regularity principle a defini-

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 197
tional matter and said, for example (Hoenigswald, 1978, p. 25),
âBut, one may ask, just what is a âsound changeâ apart from its
regularity?â
6. There are, of course, places where he could not avoid doing
otherwise. For example, in dealing with differentiation (contrast
developing from allomorphs) as well as what he termed âphonemic
affinity in replacement partners from dialect borrowing,â he found
it necessary (Hoenigswald, 1960, pp. 39-40, 51-52) to use as an ex-
ample the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *leukw and its reflexes
in Indo-Iranian and Sanskrit.
7. As opposed to zero, which is (1960, p. 35, n. 8) an allomorph.
In slightly different terms, âzeroâ denotes the absence of a morph
in a context where a morph is expected (e.g., âfishâ used as a plural
is formally comparable to âdishes,â with an overt plural marker, so
that it can be said to have a zero allomorph of a plural morpheme
or to have zero as a replacement for a plural marker. On nil, see
also Hoenigswald (1959).
8. Henryâs mode of presentation was always very concise, with-
out verbosity or excessive use of examples, depending instead on
formalism. This is evident in both Language Change and Linguistic
Reconstructionâthe text of which covers only 168 pages, including
the bibliography and indexâand, even to a larger extent, in his
later collection of three articles (1973).
9. Leumann (1927).
10. For a perceptive appreciation of the contrast between Harrisâs
distributionalist view and what Goldsmith refers to as the mediationalist
view that has dominated theoretical work in American linguistics
since the late 1950s see (Goldsmith [2005, pp. 719-724]).
11. Freely translated: Being a king can never be compared to
being a learned man; a king is honored in his own country, a learned
man is honored everywhere.

On March 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Act of Incorporation that brought the National Academy of Sciences into being. In accordance with that original charter, the Academy is a private, honorary organization of scientists, elected for outstanding contributions to knowledge, who can be called upon to advise the federal government. As an institution the Academy's goal is to work toward increasing scientific knowledge and to further the use of that knowledge for the general good.

The Biographical Memoirs, begun in 1877, are a series of volumes containing the life histories and selected bibliographies of deceased members of the Academy. Colleagues familiar with the discipline and the subject's work prepare the essays. These volumes, then, contain a record of the life and work of our most distinguished leaders in the sciences, as witnessed and interpreted by their colleagues and peers. They form a biographical history of science in America—an important part of our nation's contribution to the intellectual heritage of the world.

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